Another Brick in the Wall
by MadBadAndPlaid
Summary: When Sam vanishes on a case, it feels like all Dean's nightmares are coming true. Waking up buried alive doesn't exactly make it Sam's favorite day, either. His captor wants something he can only deliver by using powers he's sworn never to touch again and isn't even certain he still has. Someone offers Dean a way to find his brother—but the catch could kill them both.
1. in the flesh

_Dean's already living in fear of losing Sam to the hell waiting behind the wall in his head, so when Sam vanishes on a case, it feels like all his nightmares are coming true. Waking up buried alive doesn't exactly make it Sam's favorite day, either._

_Sam's captor wants something he can only deliver by using powers he's sworn never to touch again and isn't even certain he still has—but unless he does, he may never see sunlight, or Dean, again. One of Rufus's old contacts offers Dean a way to find his brother—but only if Dean does him a few favors of the sort that could get him killed and leave Sam out of luck. Both brothers will have to decide how far they'll go to get back to each other._

_And even if they do, the solution may be more dire than the problem._

* * *

><p>The Road So Far:<p>

This story is set sometime shortly after 06x17, "My Heart Will Go On": Sam has his soul back (06x12); Dean's anxious about him scratching Death's wall, especially after the Hell seizure he had at the end of the Arachne case they worked in Bristol, Rhode Island (06x13); Gwen, Samuel, and Rufus all died in the events of "And Then There Were None" (06x16), and Bobby is deep in mourning (and the bottle) for Rufus. Cas is embroiled in the heavenly war. Sam is struggling to set aside the consuming need to know exactly what he did—who he was—in the year he can't remember in order to respect Dean's fears for him. But at the end of the day, he's a hunter. Just like his brother.

Many thanks to Lux Hart for betaing this chapter. All remaining defects are mine alone.

* * *

><p>..<p>

...

..

* * *

><p>Sam expected to wake to darkness. He didn't.<p>

The rest of his expectations—pain, cold, obvious isolation—those all came true, but as he surfaced from the oily slosh in his head, he slowly realized that the gray surface in front of his eyes was shadowed, textured, and not, in fact, a dream.

Neither was the smell.

_Plink. Plink_.

A sewer. Of course it would be a sewer.

He tried to take stock of himself. He was vaguely aware that he should have felt some urgency about this, but it was too hard to fight through the sludgy feeling in his limbs, under his tongue, in his head. It pressed on his lungs, and all his thoughts were submerged in it. He hurt: burning pain where something had dragged him, dull pain where his head had bounced. He was cold. Whatever had taken him had left him in jeans and a t-shirt, and he was lying in a puddle of what, if he were very, very lucky, might be water. More than anything else, though, he felt groggy, nauseated, and stiffer than he'd ever been in his life.

How long had he been out?

_Dean_.

Slowly, Sam curled in on himself, sucked in a breath, and rolled over. Bile rose in his throat, and he had to lie still for a while, fighting not to add something new to the foulness already around him. After several long, slow breaths, he managed to get enough muscles to respond to push himself up to sitting.

He was in a concrete chamber. Its size was hard to guess; most of the room was lost in shadow, and as weak as the light was, that meant very little. This place could be a city, or it could be barely more than a tomb.

He pushed the latter thought away.

Sam stumbled to his feet. His head struck concrete and he nearly pitched forward again; groping, he found that he'd awoken in a sort of alcove. A pipe let out into it, stopped with concrete. His fingers came away wet when he touched it. The source of the puddle, probably. His shoes and one sock were gone.

Something oozed from the seams in the wall, collecting in thick bubbles and creeping in ribbons down the concrete. It looked like it should be wet, _had_ to be wet, but it didn't reflect the light in the way his brain told him it should. It took long seconds for him to work out that this was because it was the source of the light. The stuff was basically reddish orange, streaked with brown, and glowing. It looked like nothing so much as faintly luminescent sewage.

Sam grimaced and turned away.

He moistened his split lip with a clumsy tongue and tried to make himself think. Jacob Dorner. They'd been looking for Jacob Dorner, missing two days. He remembered calling Dean from Dorner's apartment, empty-handed. Agreeing to meet back at the motel. Cutting through the park that lay between Dorner's gentrifying neighborhood and the one where their motel was. Stepping off the path by chance to let a kid tear by on a trick bike and seeing—seeing—

What?

He couldn't remember. It was important, he was sure, whatever it had been, but it was gone.

His pulse leapt sluggishly in his throat when he ran up against the black space in his memory. He'd stepped off the path. He'd seen—something. Something important that had drawn him off the path. Then someone or something had— What? Struck him? Gassed him? Whammied him? Why couldn't he remember? Why was his _head_ like this?

By the time he'd woken the first time, he'd already been in darkness. Being dragged. He remembered knowing he'd been taken, but not when, or where, or how. There'd been a grip on his ankles that had seemed to bite straight through his skin, down into bone. He searched his mind for clues from that brief window of consciousness, sounds, smells, sensations from the trip down here, but everything except the pain was lost in an oily, black murk. He'd just known that something was taking him _under_, and beneath the panic, there'd been a paralyzing knowledge that that was _right_—

And the next time he'd woken, he'd been here.

Sam swallowed. He couldn't stand here cowering against the wall, clinging to the light like a child. It was damned putrid light, for one thing. He'd have to explore by touch.

He started with himself. It took scant seconds to confirm what he'd known since he first awoke: whatever had taken him had left him no weapons or tools. Knife, gun, keys, paperclips, wallet, Swiss army knife, bottle opener—all gone. Sam hissed as he probed at his back. His fingers came away slick, and the skin across his back and sides stung like a bitch as it pulled. His overshirt had probably been lost somewhere as he'd been dragged, possibly his shoes and missing sock, too, but the rest of it had to have been taken deliberately. Whatever he was up against, it was capable of at least that much thought.

And had enough of a plan for him to bother.

Was it in here with him?

Beyond abrasions and bruising, he seemed uninjured. One hand on the wall, he edged out into the darkness to his right. One pace, two, three, four, five, six—his fingers abruptly jammed into a corner. He'd found the next wall. Brick. Not concrete. Drier than the wall he'd woken up against. He traced horizontal lines of crumbling grout until suddenly the groove under his fingers bent upwards. He paused and then groped rapidly over the surface. The bricks were set in a ring to hold—

More bricks. His heart sank. There'd been an aperture there once, but it was long since sealed. Narraganset Bay had the oldest sewer system in the country. God only knew how many pockets there were like this, walled off as one part of the system fell out of use and was forgotten.

Still, it couldn't be walled off entirely. He'd been dragged here, not teleported. If there was a way in, there had to be a way out.

None of the seventeen before him had found it, though.

Whatever. This was not the time to wallow. He turned, straining his eyes for a sense of the room, and stopped. The place he'd started was on his left, but he thought he'd seen— Yes. There. Somewhere in the blackness to his right, more light.

It was impossible to tell what it was or even how far away it was, but he couldn't control the sudden jump in his pulse (_you can_, a voice whispered somewhere, _you can control all of those pathetic little reactions, it's easy, if you just remember__—_) at the sight of it. Which was idiotic. Whatever had brought him here would hardly leave him a lantern, never mind an open window.

Or maybe it would. Whatever was at work here, it seemed to have taken him because he'd stumbled on something trying to trace Jacob Dorner. If it had a victim profile, Sam probably didn't fit it. Maybe the culprit would have realized that once it got him back here. Maybe it would have lost interest. Maybe it had just dropped him. Maybe he'd see Dean again in a matter of hours.

The thoughts flashed through his mind before he could prevent them, stupid and quickly suppressed. He, of all people, should have grown out of hoping for luck by now.

He looked for the indistinct light again. It was still there.

Cautiously he started towards it. His movements were still clumsy with cold and stupor, but he felt his way over the floor with small steps. Was the light getting closer, already? Closer, yeah, but no brighter. The darkness pressed in on him like a material thing. Raspy concrete, grit, water under the pads of his feet, patches too slippery to be water—

Vertigo rolled up out of the murk in his head, obliterating what sense he had of up and down mid-stride. He stepped out into nothing.

He went down hard and ugly. Pain blossomed along his arms, shins, and jaw as he body-surfed what felt like a rock slope to land abruptly against a concrete edge that drove the air from his body. He made no sound. Keeping silent was reflex, to keep from giving his position away to anything in here with him, but probably pointless: something had made a clatter when he'd landed. Lying there in the dark, Sam tried to work out the topology involved. He'd stepped off a ledge, tumbled downward, and was lying on an angular surface with his head lower than his feet. Stairs. The floor had dropped off into sewage-slick, oversized stairs.

Stairs weren't all he was lying on. Hard knobs dug into his abdomen, and his hand had closed instinctively on something. He knew the shape. It was a femur, sticky with traces of tissue. He heard rats chitter as they scattered away from his fall.

Sam shut his eyes, unclenched his fingers, and, carefully, wiped his hand off on his jeans.

Finally he pulled himself up and, defeated by the way the world lurched around him in the dark, crawled back up the stairs like a dog. He went back to the sickly light patch where he'd started, wrapped his arms around his knees, and let his head hang between them. Exploration would have to wait for his head to clear. Abrupt holes in the floor were probably among the more benign elements in his new lodgings. He was reasonably sure he was in here alone, though, so at least he'd accomplished that much. He tried again to remember what he'd seen to lead him here, what had happened after he'd stepped off the path in the park—when? Yesterday? Today? An hour ago?

The last thing he could remember clearly was jumping aside to avoid the teenager bearing down on him on her bike. But for that, he knew, he'd never have made it this far. He was here by accident, by the dumbest of dumb luck. The good news, then, was that Dean probably would not be following him.

The bad news, of course, was that Dean probably would not be following him.

Sam lifted his head and looked out into the darkness. He could hear nothing but the rats.

Fuck it. If there was something in here with him, its plans didn't include immediately killing him, and it would know he was awake by now, anyway. He gave into nature and weakness.

"Dean?" he called.

His voice sounded pathetic in his own ears. It echoed back to him unanswered. Another _plink_ from somewhere. Then:

"Hello?"

Sam jerked his head up. The voice was hoarse, male, unfamiliar. It had come from somewhere up on his left and had a faraway quality, as if he were hearing it down a pipe. It sounded like its owner had already tried screaming.

He heaved himself back up onto his knees. "Jacob Dorner?"

"Oh, thank God," the voice babbled. "Thank God, thank God, thank God. You gotta get me out of here, man, I am _so ready_ to get out of here."

Sam grinned despite himself. Jacob Dorner had been missing two days when he and Dean had arrived in Providence, and he was still alive now. With two of them, their chances of finding a way out of here went up. And for once, Sam hadn't been too late.

"Hang on, Jacob, okay?" he called, staggering towards where he thought he'd heard the voice, one hand on the wall. "Are you hurt? Are you—"

"Shut _up!_" a woman's voice hissed. "Keep it down!"

Sam had only a moment to be stunned. It made sense for Jacob Dorner to be alive; he'd been missing for a matter of days. But the one before him, Lindsey Chase, had gone months before,_ couldn't _still be—

Then something started to scream.

* * *

><p><em>Canaan, Vermont, two days previously<em>

_._

_._

"Disappearances. In Rhode Island. Because that ended so well last time."

"Dean."

"Yeah, Sammy, sign me right the hell up for more of that. Oh. Wait. Sorry, got a little turned around, there; I meant _no_."

"This isn't the same," Sam snapped.

Dean tossed the newspaper Sam had handed him onto the table. "Really? Because man, the opening paragraph is giving me deja vu."

"Will you calm down? Bristol is on the other side of the bay. Providence is a big town, Dean. Odds against us running into anyone from… from that other job are astronomical."

Dean ran his hands down his face and let them drop into his lap. He stared up at Sam. "You never learn, do you?"

Sam bridled at that, but he kept his voice level. "I've learned a thing or two. Thanks for asking."

"Kind of my point, Sam!"

"Look, I get that you're worried about me scratching the—the _wall_, or whatever, but the last time I was in Providence was in 2007. With you. Remember?"

It was plain that remembering took Dean several seconds, but he still came back with, "That you know of."

"You're being irrational. It's a—well, all right, it's not a _big_ state, but it is still an entire U.S. state, and we can't treat the whole thing like it's radioactive. What am I supposed to do, ignore every job in the country because I _might_ have passed through somewhere nearby with Samuel before?"

Dean stood from the motel room table and crossed to the minifridge. "That's a thought." He came up with a beer and popped the cap with his ring. "We could go south. All the way south. The cold sucks, and there's shit to hunt in Mexico."

"You don't speak Spanish, Dean."

"_Yo quiero Taco Bell_."

"Oh, my God, that isn't— You know what, I'm not doing this. I don't know what your problem is, but I'm not moving to Mexico. We're in the neighborhood, and this goes back far enough that it could be our kind of thing. We should check it out. Dad would."

It was a dirty move, but other than glaring, Dean didn't comment on it. He shoved the beer back in the fridge (uncovered), snagged his keys from the table, slung his jacket over his shoulders, and slammed the door behind him. Sam listened for the sound of the Impala's engine turning over, but it didn't come. Dean couldn't go far on foot and, given how cold a spring northern Vermont was having, he probably wouldn't be long about it. Sam settled in to wait.

He knew he was going to win this. He probably already had. Not because of the force of his arguments, but because Dean had been restless with the task of dealing with Rufus's empty house since before they'd even gotten there, and because as much as he couldn't seem to find one he liked the taste of, Dean hunted compulsively, these days. Not obsessively, not rabidly, not cramming as many kills into the shortest space possible the way he had when he'd first gotten back from Hell—and certainly nothing like what Sam had been able to reconstruct of the way he'd hunted without a soul—but steadily. Pace seemed unimportant, so long as Dean was hunting _something_. Sam tried not to think too hard about exactly what exactly Dean was trying to forget, and that effort had nothing to do with Dean's warnings about scratching Death's wall.

Yet here Dean was, resisting a hunt. Except, of course, that it wasn't the hunt Dean had a problem with. Sam had lost count of how many times Dean had tried to pry Sam off his side with _Take it easy, you just got back_ or _Hey, Bobby heard of this library out in Wyoming, you should go geek out for a while_ or _Believe me when I tell you that the things you don't know could kill you._ Like any of that had ever mattered before, like Sam was infirm. Perhaps just a bit like when Sam spoke, whether to say _I'm fine, actually_ or _Hey, there's a vampire nest in the next state_, Dean didn't really hear him. Like Sam wasn't quite real.

And maybe those were the times when, just for a moment, Sam's world wavered.

But Dean needed to be hunting, and Sam refused to stop hunting, so, seeming almost baffled, and maybe faintly pissed, Dean carried on hunting with Sam. Sam knew the unspoken threat making Dean bend: that if Dean didn't, Sam would simply hunt alone. Sam told himself that this was all in Dean's head.

They were not hunting now, though. They were outside Canaan, Vermont, because Bobby would not come. They'd buried Rufus, but there was still his material ghost to put to rest. When hunters died, it was better not to leave their homes to fall into the hands of unsuspecting civilians. There was no telling what sort of artifacts or sensitive information might be in there, and anyway, hunters tended to booby trap their places. Sam and Dean knew that. Bobby knew that. But no matter what updates they'd left on Bobby's answering machine, he'd stayed where he was: in Sioux Falls, buried in books and hellishly bad whiskey. Grief had strange effects on people, sometimes.

Secretly, guiltily, Sam was glad. He had liked Rufus. He'd had a fundamental indifference to Sam and Dean that Sam had found comforting. Getting to see the material traces of his life, had been… nice. Sam had always known that Rufus was a good hunter and had suspected he'd been a truly great researcher, but the same personal indifference Sam had liked about the man had meant he couldn't simply invite himself into Rufus's library the way he did Bobby's. No quantity of Johnnie Walker Blue, it had been clear, would have been payment enough for _that_. Turned out, there was good stuff in there. Very good. Sam was looking forward to getting to read it.

If he could ever take the time without Dean ditching him. For the most solicitous of reasons, of course.

Sam emptied his half of the drawers into his duffel and then, shrugging, did Dean's. The alarm clock between the beds (concave in the middle, upholstered in a fetching green and purple houndstooth) read 9:49. After 11:00, they'd have to pay for another night. Not long to wait, then.

Sure enough, the tide of checkout brought Dean back at around twenty past ten, scowling and carrying a paper sack of road supplies. Sam had already put up the laptop and tipped out the maid.

Dean dumped the sack on the table, went to the fridge, withdrew the beer, took a swig, and made a face. He then crossed to the bathroom and dumped the flat beer into the toilet. Sam waited patiently for the sound of the bottle hitting the bottom of the trash can.

The sight of their duffels, sitting tidily beside the table, brought Dean up short. He paused, took stock of the room, narrowed his eyes, and finally looked at Sam. Sam stared back. Dean's mouth twisted in an emotion Sam would have been hard pressed to identify.

"Fine, where is this fucking hunt, exactly?"

Sam told him in the car.

Dean always preferred to hear things he didn't like while he was moving.


	2. if you should go skating

Between a five-car pile-up on I-95 and the fact that Dean wasn't in any particular hurry to get there, they didn't make it into Providence until almost six o'clock. Their first stop was a bar. There was a reason for this. Working a case right next to a town where one of them was wanted for a) beating a cop half to death and b) escaping from jail after being arrested for beating a cop half to death was some grade-A dumbass bullshit. Dean had no broad philosophical objections to doing deeply stupid things, but he refused to do them on an empty stomach.

Since it was Sam's fault they were here at all, Dean made him get the first round and their food. He'd probably end up with a veggie burger or something that way, but he wanted a moment to check in with Bobby. At some point, it had become habit to copy Bobby on their movements, and he knew without having to ask that Sam would never have initiated the call himself.

He knew it, and he hated it. For extra credit, he even tried to pretend he didn't understand it.

The call rang to voice mail, just like the previous dozen had. "_This is Robert Singer. Don't bother leaving a message, because you shouldn't have this number. If you're going to do it anyway, keep it brief._"

"Hey, Bobby." Dean sat at a corner table and surveyed a mural of a buxom half-woman, half-hot dog mermaid-type-thing lying in a bun and ecstatically squirting ketchup over one breast, mustard over the other. "Just FYI, we finished up at Rufus's. Grabbed some bits and pieces, cleaned up the curse boxes, dealt with the death traps. Should be safe for civilians in there, now." Dean cleared his throat. "So, anyway, me and Sam are down in Providence, gonna check out some missing persons. Probably nothing, but since we were in the neighborhood." The answering machine crackled static back at him. "Just… take a shower or something, alright? You stink."

He hung up. Bobby _did_ stink right now. Dean didn't have to be within a thousand mile radius of the man to know that much.

Sam reappeared from the crowd around the bar just as Dean was pocketing his cell. He slid a longneck across the table to Dean and gestured with his chin.

"Bobby?" he asked. Dean hated the fake casualness in his tone.

"Voice mail, again."

Sam nodded, sat, drank from his beer, avoided meeting Dean's eyes. Dean knew there was more coming. "Think he's okay?" Sam asked finally.

What Dean wanted to say was, _Yes. He's okay. You're okay. I'm okay. We're all okay together. We're a hell of a lot more okay than we have any right to be, despite everything, so stop tiptoeing around each other before we all stop being okay, because we broke the goddamned world once so what's a little attempted murder between friends?_

What he said was, "Yeah, if his liver's survived this long, I'm sure this won't get him."

One side of Sam's mouth lifted humorlessly in acknowledgment.

Bobby hadn't so much asked Sam and Dean to pack up Rufus's house as he had expelled them from his, so that he could research obsessively and pretend it wasn't about Rufus free from interruption. He'd done it in this reality and in the one Balthazar had altered. In this reality, though, he didn't have Ellen and Jo to look out for him in their stead, and Dean was more concerned than he cared to admit. Sam was, too, that was plain, but communication between him and Bobby remained stilted and minimal. If Dean didn't know better, he would have said Sam seemed even guiltier since they'd buried Rufus, and he was too tired to try to work out what was going on with that.

They needed a vacation. He'd yet to see any palm trees or bikinis in this town, either.

"So how many victims have you found, exactly?" Dean said, more because the way Sam kept turning his beer bottle between his fingers was driving him nuts than because he really wanted to think about the case right now.

That seemed to pull Sam back to himself some. "Twenty-six. I think. I mean, I know it's not a lot to go on. But superficially, at least, they all sound pretty similar."

"Remind me what your criteria for that were, again?"

Sam didn't rise to it. "Unsolved missing persons who all just vanished. No signs of break-in, no signs of struggle, no known motives for leaving, no notice to anybody, no signs of financial preparation, no toothbrushes packed, no suspects, no physical evidence of any kind, nothing. All different ages and occupations. One day, these people were just gone."

Assuming a positive from a whole lot of negatives, in other words. It was a bare wisp of a pattern. And yet it could be something. Sam had a gift for finding the hairline cracks that turned out to be fault lines.

Lately, that particular gift made Dean nervous.

"Did the vics all cross paths anywhere?"

They paused the conversation when the waitress delivered their food, chili dogs, good and sloppy. Dean noted that his came piled with enough onions to sink a ship; Sam must be feeling contrite. That or there was a really oblique comment in there somewhere about Dean's foul mood outranking onion breath. Hard to tell with Sam.

After a couple of minutes to start in on the dogs, Sam resumed. "Not that I can tell, but it's going to be hard to say for sure. I managed to hack police reports on a couple of the more recent ones earlier, but some of these cases are pretty old. Paper records only."

"People go missing like that all over the country, Sam. Even supposing they're all connected, what makes you think it's not just a serial killer?"

"Operating since 1963?"

Dean glanced up in surprise. "That far back?"

"Yep."

Dean considered. That there was anything supernatural here was still far from a lock; there could be two generations of human agents behind the disappearances—unlikely, but they'd run up against stranger—or there could be no connection between them at all. But the time line certainly made it weirder.

Something occurred to Dean. "When'd you find this case, anyway?"

"Last night. Noticed the headline, ran a quick search to see if it smelled like anything." He ate another bite of his chili dog, chewed, swallowed. Eventually his eyes drifted up under the weight of Dean's stare. "What?"

"So you just happened to run across a case next door to spider central? Total accident, nothing to do with checking up on what you did last year?"

"Exactly how much of an asshole are you going to be about this?" Sam asked, civilly.

"Forgive me if I'm not jumping for joy over working a case right on top of the one that gave you a grand mal seizure and almost got us both killed."

"Providence, Dean. State capital. Couple hundred thousand inhabitants. It's not 'right on top of' anything except more Providence."

"We are fifteen miles away from Bristol, Sam. I can hawk a loogie farther than that."

"You know the mileage between Bristol and Providence just off the top of your head?"

Dean bristled at the skepticism. "Look, maybe school wasn't my thing for most subjects, but geography? Geography I've got. I took first place in a geography bee when I was seven, thank you very much."

Sam blinked in surprise. "You did?"

"Yes." Dean dug resentfully into his cheese fries. "So don't give me any condescending bullcrap about how totally and amazingly safe this is."

Dean waited for the rejoinder, but none came. Finally he glanced up. Sam was gazing across the table at him with this sort of soft, dopey expression. "I never knew that," he said.

Dean glared. "Shut up."

"Seven?"

"Shut the fuck up."

"I wish I could remember that," Sam said, still with the doe-eyed shit.

It took physical effort for Dean to unclench his jaw. "Twenty-four hours," he said. "We give this thing a day. Then, when we don't find anything supernatural about it, we pack up go find a Monster Mash somewhere in SoCal. Deal?"

Sam shrugged. "Deal."

That was settled, then.

Dean should have felt better that Sam gave in so easily. He didn't.

* * *

><p>Sam pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, took a deep breath, dropped them, and stared at the laptop screen. 1:48 a.m. Eight hours out of twenty-four gone, and he had approximately dick. He already regretted agreeing to Dean's ultimatum.<p>

Or, hell, maybe he just regretted this whole trip. Providence was a regrettable town.

Some cases would break right open if you just tapped them in the right place. There'd be some convenient fact—a bizarre detail the responding officer had left out of his report because he'd just assumed he was going crazy, a place the victims had all visited, a shaman they'd all pissed off—just waiting for you to tug on it like a pull-tab and you'd basically be done except for the salting, burning, shooting, stabbing, disemboweling, decapitating, exhuming, burying, banishing, cleansing, exorcising, blessing, thieving, bombing, and/or chemical dissolution. The jobs worked themselves, practically.

Then there were the ones where extracting useful information was like trying to wring lucidity out of a septuagenarian Grateful Dead roadie.

This was shaping up to be one of the latter. Sam had been at this all night, and all he'd been able to find was crude personal data on these people that, if anything, only served to reinforce how little he had. Even focusing on the more recent names and their fresher cases,

Jacob Dorner, 33. Missing two days. Pharmaceutical sales rep. BU alum on an athletic scholarship. Had lived alone; parents both living (in Florida); one sibling, deceased. Fraternal twin—a sister. Some freak gym accident when they were 18. Her obit and a short piece in the local paper had come up in Sam's preliminary searches on Jacob; he couldn't help wondering if they'd been close.

Lindsey Chase, 27. Missing almost five months. Home health aide with an elder care agency. One surviving stepparent (Connecticut) and a maternal aunt (local); no siblings. From the handful of police documents Sam had been able to find, it looked like the aunt, not the stepfather, had been the driving force in what efforts were made to search for Lindsey. But nothing had ever been found, and the aunt's calls to the police station had gradually petered out. The last one had been almost a month ago and took half a line to document in the case file.

Anthony Marquez, 57. Missing for eight months. Reasonably successful real estate investor, stereotypical hobbies of same, home down in East Greenwich. Married for 37 years (to the same wife, no less). He'd been just distinguished enough that the local papers had tried to make a big story out of his disappearance, but it had been hard going: no likely suspects had surfaced beyond the standard investigation of his immediate family, and no trace of mob connections, embezzlement, or crooked land banking, or bizarre schemes based in the Caymans had ever materialized. The most shocking thing police and journalists had been able to uncover about Marquez was how unobjectionable his finances had actually been, which probably explained the modesty of his fortune.

Brendan Whitmore, 25. Missing for just over a year. Desk clerk at a local hotel that seemed to have peaked in the 1960s. Both parents living (local), along with a brother (older, in Wisconsin) and a sister (younger, local). Little information was available on Brendan. Like Lindsey Chase, he belonged to what seemed to journalists to be a forgettable class, and the tenor of the interviews on file with the Providence PD suggested that his family were not particularly shocked at his disappearance. He'd been living with a girlfriend, but apparently she hadn't been passionate enough about him to notice he'd gone: he was reported missing by his family after a call from his workplace. Police had found nothing at the apartment that impressed them enough to record, and the girlfriend had moved out a few months later when the lease was up. Most of the follow-up calls made to the police about Brendan had been made by the sister.

Cara Pryor, 29. She, too, had been missing for just over a year. She'd moved to Providence for work two months before, something faceless and corporate. Newspaper reports of her were minimal; at first Sam assumed that this was because she was so new to town, but her tiny Iowa hometown, though apparently aware of her disappearance, ran it in a half-sentence blurb in an "other news" section on page four. Probably had kept to herself, then—no notable connections to raise a fuss. In contrast, her police file was nil on physical evidence but long on interviews and canvasses. They'd kept it quiet, but someone in the Providence PD had had reason to suspect foul play, then. Possibly they still did: the most recent interview, with the attendant at a gym she'd used, was dated just two months ago. Her parents were living in Iowa and had had nothing useful to offer the investigation.

Marian Daniels, 47. Missing twenty-two months. Divorced mother of three, office manager at Cap in Your Crown dentistry in Manton. Her three children had long since moved out of state to live with their father. She had no criminal record, an unremarkable credit record, and was, to all appearances, mourned by her family, her colleagues, and her local branch of MADD.

And so on. And on, all the way back to the JFK assassination. Ample facts, but all of them banal. And he couldn't find the common thread. Different ages, different genders, different ethnicities, different occupations, different tax brackets. They'd lived and worked all over the city—all over the Narragansett Bay area, in fact. They'd been loved, loathed, and everything in between.

There was, in fact, no reason whatever to suppose that a given supernatural entity had done anything to any of them, much less all of them.

In a fit of pique, Sam hit close-all on the browser tabs and slammed the laptop shut. Then he sat in darkness, because the blue tint of the screen had been the room's only light.

Dean was asleep. Sam could just barely hear his breathing, soft, regular. Better sleep than he'd been getting lately, then. Better than Sam could remember Dean getting since… since he'd returned. Not that that was a useful measure, _since he'd returned_, because he'd only really returned a few months ago. It seemed unlikely that Dean had slept any better while he was sharing digs with the version of Sam that never slept and had used him as an experiment (just the once. Just the once that Dean knew about. Please, God, let it have been just the once). Before that, then? How had Dean slept with Lisa?

He didn't have the right to even wonder about that.

Sam let the dark and quiet sit on him, soothing his headache. He should actually be glad of Dean's ultimatum, he decided. It was going to give him an out. Dean was hung up on the times Sam had been in Bristol, across the bay, but Sam found that he was, to his own frustration, hung up on the time that he had actually been _here_, in Providence, even though Dean seemed almost to have forgotten it outright. For a scant day or so, back then, before the lie showed through, it had been their first brush with angels.

Screw this town. The police stations all seemed to share one document scanner between them, the curb appeal was dismal, and some public-spirited individual really needed to swing by Brown with thermite and a masonry drill and deliver the world from that fucking motto. Sam had brought them here on a fool's errand. He should just admit that he'd dragged them here over nothing, go through the motions until the clock ran out, and let Dean drive them back out of here without a fight. He should.

He should just let it go, and let Dean think that, yeah, he'd cracked, that he _was_ cracked, and that it was probably better for everyone not to take anything he said too seriously.

(Had Dean felt like this around Sam, back when he'd first gotten back from Hell?—No, don't think it, not the same, can't, no right—)

"Sam."

Sam started slightly. He twisted in his chair. Dean lay on his side, unmoving under the covers, eyes cracked and just visible in the ghost light that leaked in around the drapes from the parking lot.

"Go the fuck to sleep." Dean's eyes glittered in the dark for a moment longer, then shut again.

Sam watched him for a long moment. Then he stood, stripped, and folded his outer clothes away (no gore and no grave dirt, good for a second or third wearing). The numbers on the radio clock on the night stand were green. 2:17 a.m.

He peeled down the thin, plastic-slick comforter on his bed, climbed between the sheets, shut his eyes, and listened for Dean's breathing. He couldn't hear it anymore. Too light.

Slowly, carefully, but still with a quiet creak of springs, he turned onto his side and tried to empty his mind. He lay curled toward his brother. They'd be gone this time tomorrow. There was nothing here.

* * *

><p><em>Now<em>

.

.

The screaming was wordless and thoughtless. For several seconds, Sam thought he was hearing some kind of animal, though he couldn't figure out which. Then he heard the second voice shriek through it:

"You _woke her up_! You fucking _woke her up_!"

Sam wasn't sure he could have made himself heard even if he'd had an answer. The screaming obliterated the silence. It was relentless, battering itself to piece against the walls with barely enough time between blasts to believe that whoever was doing it was taking breaths. It drove right through his nasal bone and into his brain, making the fog there throb. Between the state of his head and just how loud it was, it was hard to say exactly where the screams were coming from, but it seemed almost like they came from somewhere above him.

"Well, I'm sorry!" Dorner shouted back. His voice was edged with hysteria. "Jesus, can't you shut her up?"

Apparently she could. A minute later, there was a muffled noise, and the screaming trailed off into sobbing. Sam felt queasy.

The silence—the relative quiet, anyway—was uncomfortable on just about every level. Sam shivered, pressed his eyes shut, and made himself breathe steadily. There were questions to ask, now. Obvious ones hanging right in front of him. It shouldn't have been so difficult to think of them. It shouldn't have been so difficult to think, period.

He wasn't alone. There were people alive down here. This was good news. Good.

Sam made his tongue work. "Are you Jacob Dorner?" he called, quietly.

There was a pause. Then, also quietly, "Yeah."

"Who else is there?"

"Please get me out," Jacob said instead of answering. "Please."

"Who's there?" Sam asked again.

There was a shuffling sound, perhaps someone moving closer to his voice. "I'm Lindsey." It was the woman who'd told them to be quiet; the fury was gone, and now her voice just sounded thin and exhausted. "I'm Lindsey."

"Lindsey, Jacob, I'm Sam."

"Are you going to get us out of here, or what?"—Jacob again.

Sam ignored him. "Lindsey, who else is in here?"

"He can't get us out," Lindsey said dully, answering Jacob, not Sam. "It brought him here same as us. I told you."

"My brother's looking for me, Lindsey," he said. "He'll find us."

"He won't."

Sam's headache ratcheted up a notch. This was not helping. Together, they might have a chance of escaping, but only if he could counter Lindsey's despair. He needed them believing that they had a future. "Yes, he will." He tried to make his voice firm; his body felt anything but. "He's looking for us now, and believe me, he won't give up."

"My aunt probably never gave up, either," she said viciously. Sam stayed silent and didn't tell her that, in fact, her aunt pretty much had. "She's probably been to everybody from the cops to the newspapers to Mulder and fucking Scully. Think your brother's going to be any different?"

"Trust me," said Sam, "we're different."

He shuddered and resisted the urge to wrap his arms around himself. The throbbing in his head had become rhythmic; it felt as if the air itself were flexing in on him, over and over, pressing on his eyes and his ears and his sinuses. An oily, prickly sensation skittered over his skin, like a hundred thousand burrowing mites. What they hell had whammied him that could make him feel like this?

The second woman was still crying, quietly. "Please, God," Jacob said, "you've got to get me out of here. Please."

"Lindsey." Sam put every ounce of authority and rationality he could into the word. "_Who's crying?_"

At first, Sam thought she wasn't going to answer him. Finally she said, "Marian something. That's all I know."

It took Sam a very long time to make his thoughts work. For a while the information just sat there in his mind. Then, almost unconsciously, he began to count backwards through the names. Marian. Marian Daniels, number twelve of seventeen.

She'd been gone almost two years.

Before he could even formulate his next question, the air went suddenly charged. Electricity—not a metaphor; the real deal—zinged through his nerves thin and sharp as a needle. The pounding behind his eyes intensified and it seemed as if the darkness rippled into and through him, like a living, infecting thing.

The walls began to bleed.

Had it not been so dark, Sam might not have seen it. The glowing patch beside his head seemed to intensify; then, as he watched, he realized that the dark filaments in the glowing fluid seemed to be spooling faster, curling, elongating into fattening bubbles of ooze. More of whatever the substance was being forced between the concrete seams. Fat, sickly drops welled up, distended, and dripped slowly down the surface of the wall. Sam heard Jacob Dorner give one hoarse shout.

Cold slammed into the air.

Somewhere, Marian Daniels was still crying. Sam realized suddenly that there were words hitched in between the sobs:

"It's coming. It's coming. It's coming."

* * *

><p>..<p>

...

..

* * *

><p>AN: Sorry this took so long. Although nothing's much changed in my conception of the plot (I do have one! No, really!), my approach to this fic took a hard left turn, and then another, and then several more. Now that I've committed to a way to tell this story—for better or worse—I hope I can get the material out faster.

Disclaimer: I have nothing against Brown University. I've never even been there, and come to think of it, I don't think I know any Brunonians; I just needed a throwaway line for Sam to be grouchy about Providence. The motto he's pissed off about, by the way, is _In Deo Speramus_—In God We Hope. Academic pros and cons aside, Sam is understandably a little bitter.

I've taken liberties with the Narragansett Bay sewer system and will take plenty more. Providence's sewers are among the oldest (and coolest) in the nation, though, even if there's no supernatural horror lurking in them. Probably.


	3. thin ice of modern life

A/N: So many apologies to the residents of Providence, RI. Everything I "know" about that town I learned from Wikipedia.

This chapter: Sam thinks he knows what he's fighting. Dean thinks he knows how to get his brother out in one piece. They're both wrong.

* * *

><p>..<p>

...

..

* * *

><p>"Jacob! Jacob, hang on!"<p>

Sam tried to stand, but the floor pitched and rolled. "Jacob, look for iron!"

A long, thin sound snaked out of the air. It sounded like nothing so much as a seething pipe, but human. Horribly human. It waned into silence.

"Jacob?" Sam found purchase on the wall. "Is it in there with you? Can you see it?"

The pounding had gone from his sinuses, suddenly, and the sharp cold was receding. But Sam could still feel a prickling across his skin, and the air was made up of slow, syrupy waves of wrongness. It was getting harder and harder to breathe. Water trickling; rats scratching; Marian sobbing; no sound at all from Jacob.

"He can't hear you," Lindsey said. She might have been discussing the weather.

"Is he— Did it kill him? Where are you? Are you in the same room as Jacob? Can you see what's happening?"

"Kill him? No. It's just visiting."

Sam tried that sentence from every angle. "What?"

"It came to visit him." Some of the viciousness was creeping back into her voice. "I told him it would. And it'll visit you before long, too."

"What do you mean?"

"It visits us. It's what we're here for, I guess. I don't know. It's not _human_."

Sam leaned against the wall and shut his eyes. It made barely any difference to what he could see. "Yeah, I know. It's a spirit. A ghost."

She snorted.

"Lindsey, I'm serious," he said tiredly. "I don't know what kind, and I don't know how the hell it's doing what it's doing, but it's definitely a spirit. I've felt that kind of cold too many times before not to know. My brother and I—we hunt them."

"Wow. Most people have to be down here ages to get as crazy as you."

"Your name is Lindsey Chase." Talking was difficult; his tongue felt thick in his mouth, like he might throw up at any moment. "You're from Federal Hill. You're a geriatric caregiver. Your aunt is Mildred Shandy. You've been gone almost five months."

She didn't answer for a while. Then, finally: "Five months?"

Sam let his breath out. "Yeah. Sorry."

Her voice was tiny. "Is Marmee okay?"

Presumably that was her aunt. Kind of a delicate question, under the circumstances. _She's peachy, Linds; called the police station every day for a while, but, y'know, life goes on, and now your room's a scrapbooking studio. Looks like a pretty sweet set-up._ "Yeah, Lindsey, she's fine, but I still need to know what's going on. The ghost—whatever—what did it do to Jacob?"

"It's doing it right now. It's— I can't explain. It _visits_ you."

Sam's temper flared. That wasn't an answer, and she wasn't even trying. "I can't help you if you won't talk to me."

"You can't help me no matter what."

For several minutes, something had been nagging at him. All at once he realized that it was the blank space in the conversation where Marian Daniels should have been. If Lindsey couldn't or wouldn't give him answers, maybe she would. "Marian?" he called. "Marian, what's it doing? What's it look like? Please, answer me! We need to help Jacob!"

"She doesn't talk." Lindsey's voice was flat again. "Not anymore."

Sam ignored her. "Marian, I'm Sam Winchester. Can you hear me?"

Nothing.

He was buried alive. The air was so thick with malevolent energy that he could barely breathe. There were at least other people down here. None of them had ever gotten out, and they'd had ample opportunity to try.

_Dean_.

Before he could stop it, Sam found himself retching. The cold and the nausea were too much, and his body shook with the effort of holding himself up against the wall. Distantly, he heard Lindsey's voice, laden with incredulity and disgust: "Did you just _puke_? Great. That's great. At this rate, you'll last even less time than the last one."

Sam spat and turned away from the pile. He'd spattered his bare foot with his own vomit and he had corpse residue under his fingernails and this place was literally awash in shit but he couldn't think about any of that right now, no time, oh, God, he needed to wash his hands. _Dean. Dean_.

"Lindsey, this is important. I need to know about the… thing that took us. You must have seen it. Heard it. Something. I think it's probably a spirit, but there are all kinds of different spirits even if I'm right." He tried to make his voice compassionate, reasonable. "Look, even if I am a nutcase, what do you have to lose?"

Her voice, when it came, was hesitant, almost childlike. Her moods seem to swing like a weather vane. "It— I don't know, okay? It just—it just comes and lies down in you. I used to think it would be awesome to be able to walk through walls, you know, when I watched cartoons as a kid. It isn't. It's horrible. And even when it takes you all the way out, _outside_, it's never like you're out. Because you aren't. For a long time I used to think, 'I'm gonna get out this time. If I can just shake it off of me while it's riding me outside….' But then I come to and I'm right back here. Never left. Because it's riding you, but you're riding in it more."

Sam tried to sift through her fragmentary explanation. "It possesses you?"

"Call it whatever you want."

None of it made sense. Ghosts kidnapped people, yes; ghosts possessed people, yes; but they didn't keep people as pets, and no amount of supernatural possession would let someone with a flesh-and-blood body walk through a concrete wall without becoming mostly blood and nothing recognizable as flesh. She had to mean some sort of mental trip, then. A ghost-induced dream. But why? What did a ghost need a body for if it wasn't _using_ the body? What the hell was this thing doing?

Lindsey seemed very confident that he was going to find out.

"Spirits, they all want something. What does it want?"

"Don't you think I've asked it?" she broke out. "It doesn't listen. I'm not sure it can. It doesn't listen, doesn't talk. It's like Marian, but worse."

Sam felt his way along the wall, moving unsteadily towards the sound of her voice. "It takes you over. You must have gotten some kind of a sense while it was possessing you, some feeling."

_Plink. Plink_.

"Lindsey?"

"It's looking for something," she said finally.

He had to act. Had to get these people out of here, had to get back to Dean. First think he had to figure out this room. Arm himself, if he could. Maybe one of the skeletons in here had left something. Tools, weapons, metal fragments, something, anything. Then he'd figure out how to get to Jacob and Lindsey and Marian. Then… then…

The world tipped to the side. He felt the wall scrape over his ribs, then the floor under his cheek. He had about enough time to hope he hadn't gone down in his vomit before he lost consciousness.

* * *

><p><em>Providence, Rhode Island, one day prior<em>

.

.

Dean flexed his hand over the grip of his Colt and advanced through the dark. The street was too quiet.

He signaled with his free hand, a nearly invisible gesture that was all they ever needed between them. But Sam was already a dozen feet up the alley, disappearing through the warehouse's side door.

How had he gotten so far ahead?

Dean chased after him, got the door open, and swung around into the thicker darkness of the warehouse. High windows let in red light that didn't penetrate the murk. He could just barely see Sam across the huge room, jogging into the pitch-black guts of the place, weapon out. Dean swore silently and followed.

The warehouse was a labyrinth. Offices, corridors, dead machines. Dean could barely keep Sam in sight; there was no time to ask what he'd seen, what they were running towards. Then he rounded a corner and Sam was gone. The dull red exit sign showed nothing but empty hallway. Dean pulled up short. He listened, straining—there. Muffled footfalls in a stairwell.

Then he was tumbling out the door at the bottom of the stairs and out into the cool moonlight. Sam's back was pale in his jacket, away down the road.

Unease stirred in the pit of Dean's stomach as he pursued. They were supposed to be chasing _it_, but anything could have happened in the blank stretch of the warehouse. It could have circled around behind them. There was no way to know.

The dark street gained a sidewalk; then trees; then houses. The houses firmed up. White clapboard, white mailboxes, gray shutters, black lawns. Windows were dark. Everything was still. No cars anywhere. Dean just about caught up to Sam, and the disquiet he felt eased slightly. But then he realized that he didn't know where the hell they were.

Dean had a stellar sense of direction. He could navigate between any two U.S. cities without once using a major highway, but he always felt just a little bit turned around in subdivisions. Everything looked the same in a deep way that overrode the helpful street signs and he'd never gotten used to it, the whole year. They were like that place in that book Sammy had liked when he was little, the one with the girl and the not-witches and the tesseract. That place where the kids bounced balls and screamed.

Didn't that book have angels in it?

Sam disappeared around the corner of a house.

He was walking at least as fast as Sam, but he kept losing the ground he gained. His stomach churned. He passed underneath a streetlight, and its rays pounded into his skull, violently, as violently as the rushing blood and pulsing hearts all around him pounded on his ears. Had it gotten behind them? He hoped so. Whatever it was, he'd drain it dry—

Then he was out of the streetlight and out of the chaos, cutting across a lawn. The grass was cool and wet and silent.

Sam disappeared around a hedge.

This house had its porch light on. Lisa stood in the door; when she saw Dean, she put her arm around Ben, turned, and vanished into the darkened house. At the same instant, Dean saw a flash of tan jacket at the open garage door. Sam. _No_. Dean's pulse jumped in his throat and he ran, caught the door before it had even closed—

—but Sam wasn't going through the door into the house. He was going out by the side door. The latch of the interior door clicked; it swung just barely open, showing a sliver of the kitchen beyond. Dean vaulted over the trunk of Lisa's sedan after Sam.

It could be anywhere, by now. It could be behind them instead of in front of them and Lisa's kitchen door was open. Sam passed through a pale garden gate.

Back onto the sidewalk. Streetlights were winking out, one by one. Dean chased after his brother.

He put on a burst of speed until Sam was only a few yards ahead. "Sam!" he hissed, loud as he dared. Sam didn't hear him..

A rushing came over the tops of the trees. Dean ran, but felt his stomach plummet as he realized he wasn't trying to catch up. The house ahead sat in a bare lawn. A poisonous golden glow seeped around the edges of the door as they approached it.

_"Sam!"_

Sam disappeared through the door without looking back. The light grew in the windows.

It grew, and grew—

* * *

><p>Dean started awake.<p>

It was the sickening hypnic jerk that brought him to with the metallic taste of fear in his mouth but translated into barely a twitch of outward motion. He hated waking up this way. Whatever nightmare had forced him out of itself always slammed the door after him, as gone from his memory as if it had never been recorded, but somehow it was still worse this way than when he woke gasping and the pictures drenched his mind for days.

He lay, eyes still closed, feeling almost paralyzed for several long seconds. There wasn't enough warmth of comfort in this bed to be worth trying to hang onto, though, so finally he let his eyes slit open.

The opposite bed was empty.

Dean sat up and threw off the covers, right hand closing around the .45 under his pillow. "Sam?"

But he knew already that the room was empty. For a ludicrous moment, his pulse spiked. Then he saw the note on the nightstand, sticking up in a little folded tent. He picked it up and thunked the .45 down in its place. _Going to Brown cops at vic's apt this a.m. check your email._ Right. The radio clock read 7:17. Dean stared balefully at Sam's military-neat bed, made more tightly than the maids had ever done it. The asshole had gotten dressed, made his bed, and _left_, and Dean hadn't even woken up. That was a thing that had apparently happened and therefore could happen again.

"Jesus," Dean muttered. He dragged his forearm across his face. "Why the fuck are we _here_."

Didn't matter. Didn't matter that this whole town gave him the heebs, either. Just a few more hours to make it through.

* * *

><p>Sam held a pen poised over his steno pad. "So how well would you say you know Jacob?"<p>

"Uhhh…." Coach Darden Babcock inserted a fingertip into his ear and rotated it. Twenty yards out from the dock on which they stood, a long, needle-like boat shot past, oars flashing. "Still see him at races from time to time, but it's been ten years since I coached him, you know? I guess I know him medium-well."

"Medium-well," Sam repeated.

"Yuh-huh."

"And about how well is that?"

Babcock looked faintly perplexed. Sam didn't think it was the question; it seemed to be more or less permanent. "I guess I remember him better than I might have because of what happened to his sister. She died," he added helpfully. "Summer before he started here. We were all real worried about him, he was a top thirty sculler, but he did okay."

"So what was he like?"

"Good kid. Popular. Kind of edgy that first semester, but like, fair enough, right? Anyway, he kept up with the team, kept up with his schoolwork, and he seemed better after that first break. More, uh, confident, you know? Outgoing. Real confident guy, real sociable. _KIRSCHMAN!"_

Sam jumped. Babcock screamed across the water, face purple:_"WHY IS YOUR GUT OUT? ARE YOU PREGNANT? DID YOU EAT YOUR COXSWAIN? SUCK IT IN AND ROW!"_

Babcock turned back to Sam, wide-eyed and mild, veins deflating in his temples. Sam cleared his throat. "Um. So, um. He was well liked?"

"Oh, yeah."

"What about enemies? Grudges?" He kept his expression as neutral as possible. "Any strange behaviors, untoward interests?"

"Oh, nah."

"So he was solid and dependable and popular. Who was close to him?"

"Oh, I dunno."

Sam counted to ten. He'd been getting answers of this caliber all morning, and he found himself wrestling with an unfamiliar itch to just start shooting people in the kneecaps and see what happened.

Jacob Dorner, everyone agreed, was a popular guy. Confident. Fun. Good at parties. He had bosses and coworkers who all hoped he was okay, wherever he was, because he was a great guy, you know, competitive but a real team player. He had rowing buddies at a mid-priced boat club who considered him first or at least second choice for inviting along on any sort of outdoor endeavor. He had a string of ex-girlfriends who remembered him as fun to go out with, okay in bed, and sad but gracious when they all decided to move on. He had phone records full of acquaintances who all agreed that he was absolutely the guy you wanted to help you move a couch. He had a coffee shop downstairs from his office where the barista remembered him as a regular and a good tipper.

What he did not seem to have was any close friends at all. No one who could say why he might have disappeared, where he might have gone, whether he believed in God, where he bought his clothes, if he'd been afraid of anything. His most recent girlfriend seemed genuinely upset that he was missing and likely dead, but had never lived with him and couldn't even remember what they'd liked to talk about. Did he have any hobbies, aside from rowing? Probably, said the girlfriend. Did he have any routines? Yes, she knew that he jogged most mornings and hit the gym most afternoons. Did she know what routes, what gym? No, Jacob had liked to go alone. Did he ever say, do, or mention anything weird? Anything at all? No. Never. Completely normal.

No one was completely normal to the people who truly knew them. But no one seemed to know Jacob Dorner that well.

If Sam's attention had been drawn to Jacob as an individual, rather than as one name in a pattern, he'd have probably focused on his sister's death. It was the one thing in the man's blandly upper-middle life that had not gone to plan. The only real thing, Sam found himself thinking, that had ever happened to him at all, until he'd gone missing.

"What can you tell me about the sister?" he asked on impulse. "Did Jacob ever seem…" He spread his hands and kept his expression innocent. "…haunted by her death?"

Babcock scritched at the side of his ball cap. "Uh. Not really?" he offered. "He took it better than I would've taken a thing like that. She was a rower, too, real, real gifted, had a scholarship here just like her brother. They used to pull together, so I guess they were pretty close, think she was his twin. He only ever talked about her once—PORT PRESSURE! _PORT PRESSURE, YOU HOG FELCHERS!"_

Sam waited for Babcock's complexion to return to normal. "What did he say?"

"Not much. See, Jacob was good, but he was never going to go pro. But it didn't seem to bother him, and most kids, that would bother them. Like, they all have the drive, but only so long as they think they're going to go to the Olympics some day. Then they lose focus and quit on you when it doesn't shape up that way. Not Jacob. So I asked him where he got that kind of sportsmanship at his age, and he told me that after watching his sister go like that, nothing else seemed that significant."

Sam paused. "Wait a minute. He watched her die?"

"Messed up, right? They were working out together. Some sort of accident with the weights, or something. She got trapped, or something. I don't even know where I heard that much about it, someone in admissions probably, it sure wasn't from Jacob. That one time was about the most he ever talked about her."

"Huh."

"Yeah."

"Mr. Babcock, when's the last time you saw Jacob?"

"He came out for the alumni erg sprints in February. Hey." He brightened. "His times were terrible. Maybe something was wrong?"

Sam stared at him. "That— That could be, I guess." His phone vibrated in his pocket. "Thanks for your time, Mr. Babcock."

"Yeah, no problem. _DAVIES!"_

Sam hastened away from the docks before he picked up the call, the phone buzzing irritably the while. He didn't bother to look at the caller ID. "Hey."

"Jesus, finally. Jerk it in the shower like a normal workaholic "

Sam glared at a passing squirrel. "I was just wrapping up an interview," he told Dean, and asked, pointedly, "You have something?"

"Got a great big pile of squat. Been working my way through the info you emailed; hit up the Fourth District station to see what I could get on the one before Dorner, Nurse Lindsey. They're not as tight-assed about it if you want to poke around in the stale stuff."

"Good thinking."

"Yeah, except nothing they forked over tells us anything we didn't already know. So do you want to get some grub, or what?"

Sam started to accept, then remembered that Dean had them on a timetable. Dean had them on a timetable, and he was trying to find every little way he could to run down the clock and get them out of this town without ever getting any real work done, and he wasn't even being subtle about it.

He could say something. He could not say something, but refuse to go and instead use every agreed-upon hour to work. That was probably what he should do. But instead he said, "Yeah, sure. But give me a couple of hours; you can pick me up at the library here." And he rattled off the address for the Rockefeller library, ignored Dean grousing about _What am I, your chauffeur?,_ and jogged the last few yards to catch the campus shuttle that was just pulling in up ahead.

Dean didn't think that Sam knew. Dean never did, when he tried to make Sam's decisions for him.

* * *

><p>"Hot wieners," Dean said happily.<p>

College Hill was lousy with restaurants, but Dean had rejected all of them on the grounds that if they had to be here, they weren't leaving without taking time to appreciate Providence's one contribution to higher culture: Olneyville NY System. There was a location a short walk away from Jacob Dorner's apartment, so Sam went with it.

"So still no overlaps between these people?" Dean asked as they joined the line to order. "Nothing in common at all that could tell us what we're looking for, here?"

Two hours in the library had turned twenty-six names into seventeen. Of the other nine, Sam had eventually been able to find some likely trace: bodies that turned up states away, hints of new lives started across the country. And it was possible that the remaining cases had explanations that were just as mundane. Still, he couldn't let go of the thoroughness and abruptness with which those seventeen had vanished. Something else nagged at him, too: plotting the frequency of disappearances gave not a random distribution, not a line, but an exponential curve.

They were being taken faster.

"Not yet. But there's something, Dean. We just have to keep digging."

"We've got…" Dean checked the time on his phone. "…six hours to wrap this one, Sammy. Just a reminder."

"Six hours to find evidence of supernatural involvement. Just a reminder."

"I'm telling you, Sam, I've been all over those files and I just don't see anything. There isn't even one place where they all went missing from for us to check out." They arrived at the front of the line and Dean leaned against the counter, xylophoning his knuckles against the edge of the formica. "Hey, yeah, uh, gimme a Coke and three hot wieners, please."

The old, kind of frighteningly intense guy behind the register scrawled on a ticket. "How you want 'em dressed?"

"All the way."

The man nodded curtly, like this was the only correct answer.

"Sure you want to take those hot wieners all the way, Dean?" Sam asked blandly.

"Seriously? You drag me along on the world's most bullshit case and you're going to begrudge me some onions?"

Fucking with Dean was always the most fun when Dean didn't even catch on.

The wiener man gave Sam the unamused look of someone who's heard the same joke every day for forty years. Sam gave his order (salad and a wiener, undressed, evidently not the correct answer) and they headed for a table. "If they didn't all go missing from the same place, then they probably weren't victims of opportunity," Sam said, sliding into the booth across from Dean. "They were chosen. If they were chosen, there had to be criteria. There's _something_ connecting them."

"Yeah, but is it a supernatural something?"

"Might be. Found out something interesting about Jacob Dorner just before you called. Remember that he had a sister who died? Apparently he watched it happen. And apparently, it was on the freaky side. She was benching and the bar slipped, crushed her throat. This girl was a serious rower; she could probably bench as much as you"—Dean snorted.—"and she definitely knew basic safety protocols. Jacob basically never talked about it to anyone. Not to his parents, not to his friends, not to his coaches. Maybe he saw something."

"Okay, I can see why I'd care about this if we were investigating _her_ death, but we aren't. Didn't even happen in the same state. You're reaching, bro."

"Yeah, okay, admittedly, but as far as the public record goes, it's the weirdest thing ever to happen to any of them." Sam shrugged. "Maybe if we dig far enough, we'll find something similar on all of them. Maybe it's about loss."

"So you're thinking, what—some kind of curse?"

"I don't know. Maybe."

"That's a lot of maybes."

Sam ignored this. "Tell me about what the cops have."

One of Dean's conditions for taking this case had been that Sam was banned from impersonating police. Sam didn't mind; Dean was right, for one thing, and anyway it was good to keep in practice impersonating other random authority figures, fictional relatives, and trustworthy journeymen. It kept the mind limber. Practically equivalent to crossword puzzles, really.

Dean pried a wad of napkins out of the dispenser. "Freshest one, Lindsey Chase? She went for her lunch break at the nursing home where her agency had her and never came back. Coworkers said she usually ate in the neighborhood park, even in winter, so she could smoke. Police didn't find anything suspicious there, but it was two days before they checked. I went by and had a look at it; it's pretty much just a picnic bench and a glorified drainage bitch, but there's enough cover that somebody might have been able to snatch her without being seen. There's no sign any of the others ever set foot in the place, though, and your banker, Marquez, definitely didn't. A dude sold him flowers on the other side of town maybe fifteen minutes after his secretary saw him leave work. He was walking from his office to meet his wife for dinner and never showed."

"What about gyms? And this might sound weird, but did he do any boating?"

"Nah. Talked to Mrs. Marquez; sounds like he was strictly a landlubber. He wouldn't even go on a cruise with her. He did belong to a gym, but it was the one in their little gated community. None of the others went anywhere near there, and I don't think Lindsey Chase even knew what gyms are for."

A food runner slid their orders across the table, the smell of onions and chili rising up with the steam. Dean tucked a napkin into the collar of his Faux Fed couture.

"Three hot wieners, Dean?" Sam said. "Really think you can take that many?"

"Well breakfast was at fuck me o'clock, thanks to your overdeveloped work ethic, so, yeah." Dean took a bite and chewed with his mouth half open, a blissed-out look on his face. "How's your salad, Francis?"

"Green. How's that hot wiener?"

"Pretty damned good. Skipping the chili was a mistake, I'm telling you."

"I dunno. That one looks like a mouthful."

"Sammy, are you intimidated by my hot wiener?"

"It is pretty thick." A gob of chili splatted into the basket when Dean went to take a bite. "Not much good if it's just going to go off in your lap, though."

"You've got the wrong attitude for eating hot wieners, Sam. It's supposed to be a pleasurable experience. You gotta get your hands dirty."

"Hey, I'm not a prude. I've had my share hot wieners. Just because I won't eat _any_ hot wiener—"

"Ohh, I see how it is. You act all picky, but really you just want your hot wieners naked in your mouth."

Two glasses were slammed down onto the table between them, right next to their empties. The man from the register glared at them and stalked away.

Dean looked levelly at Sam while he chewed the last of his food. "Hot wieners are serious business."

Sam agreed with a tilt of an eyebrow. He wiped his (chili-free, thanks) fingers and stretched his legs under the table. "Alright. We should get moving. The police are probably done with Dorner's apartment by now, so I'm going to check it out. How about you?"

"I started looking at the next one back, Brendan Whatshisname, while I was wasting away from hunger waiting on your ass. The police file on him is pretty thin. Apparently he'd had some skirmishes with juvie, and the girlfriend had a record for fraud. They never looked too hard, basically. I got a hold of the sister, though; heading to her place next."

"Were the local detectives curious at all why you were asking for all these files?"

"Sure."

"And?"

Dean drained the last of his refill. "I told them the Bureau was considering whether they might be related."

"And?"

"They didn't actually laugh in my face, because FBI, but they did that face-twitch thing cops do when they really wish they could laugh in your face."

Sam couldn't entirely hid his disappointment. He'd been hoping, in some part of him, that if only they suggested it to the law enforcement who'd worked the cases in real time, someone there would realize that there really was some connection, some clue that had previously been discounted that he and Dean didn't have yet.

"Sam, maybe there just isn't anything here." Dean's voice was irritatingly nonjudgmental. "There was a lead, we checked it out, it didn't pan. Not the first time, won't be the last. Unless the fuglies' Mother of All really does manage to gank us, anyway."

Except that this _was_ different. Sam could feel it in every forcedly casual thing Dean said to him, every just-gonna-stroll-down-to-the-ice-machine-while-I-talk-to-Bobby,-no-big phone conversation Dean thought Sam didn't know was about him, and, most of all, every hunt Dean tried to get Sam to sit out, because apparently no one at all or even some stranger was better at your back than a time bomb.

But saying so would only make him sound—paranoid. Unbalanced. Admitting he'd been wrong about this one would erode Dean's trust in him incrementally; insisting that he wasn't would calve it off like a glacier.

He slid out of the booth and stood. "Well, we might as well finish up what we started. Don't keep the lady waiting."

Dean belched slightly and fished out the car keys. "Want me to drop you off?"

"Nah. It's only a few minutes from here. I could use the walk."

"'K. I'll let you know if Whitmore's sister gives me anything interesting."

They parted ways at the door. Sam could hear the Impala's engine turn over as he started off westward, then, a minute later, the rumble receding behind him.

He'd only gone three blocks when he saw it. Technically, he'd seen its steeple from a mile off, but Providence had so many steeples on offer that he hadn't paid any attention. There it was, though: the Church of Our Lady of the Angels.

Father Gregory's church.

In fairness, it made sense that Dean wouldn't remember the Providence case so well. They led colorful lives, and Father Gregory had never appeared to Dean. If he had—well. He'd remember. Sam had never heard of a spirit touching the living like that before or since, and that, in itself, was interesting. Maybe Father Gregory hadn't been an angel, but he'd been something they'd never suspected a spirit could be, either. And was the thing: they'd never know all that spirits were capable of.

Sam slowed, then stopped. He found himself standing before the steps almost without realizing it. He looked, first, for the bloodstain Father Gregory had once left there; but it was long gone, of course. He raised his eyes to the facade.

The church looked different, seen like this. It had been winter when they'd come here last, cold and wet and gray, and the stones of the church and the clouds in the sky had all seemed like more of the same. Now, the neighborhood was just as down-at-heel as it had been, but the church jutted up into a clear spring sky, every block, arch, and ornament etched in clean, slanting sunlight. It was even possible to make out the leaded pattern of the principal stained glass window: Mary, at the center of a perfectly circle of angels ranged like spokes in a wheel.

"You!"

Sam twisted. An ashen-faced priest was staring at him from the sidewalk in shock. He took a step towards Sam.

"It is you, isn't it? What are you doing here?" Father Reynolds demanded. There was no anger or fear in his face, at least not yet; he was too shaken for that.

Sam opened his mouth, but nothing came out. Father Reynolds came up to him, studying him. He had not aged well.

"Well," the priest said eventually. "Come in, then." He turned and began to climb the steps.

Father Reynolds moved with difficulty, like he'd aged ten years instead of three (_four_). His back was thin and bent under his robe. Harmless; defenseless. The urge to grab his skull by his hair and drive his face into the steps until it was obliterated rolled up in Sam with such sudden intensity that for a split second, he saw it happening as plainly as a movie. Hate and blood and bone and slamming _againagainagain_—

Sam fled.

* * *

><p>The apartment complex Jacob Dorner lived in had been something industrial before it had been gutted and recast in a fashion designer's image of industry. It wasn't the only one; similar gentrified buildings studded the street, obtrusive among the working class homes that predated them.<p>

Breaking in was simple enough. Dorner's salary was good but not lavish, and the car registered to his name was a three-year-old Ford Focus. He was not a man who lived above his means. Sure enough, there was no doorman, and the security system was a mass-produced cakewalk. All the tenants here were younger professional types and it was still the middle of the workday, so as soon as he'd cased the building to be sure the police presence had departed, Sam had the run of the place.

There was no crime scene tape. There was no crime scene, technically. Sam eased the front door shut behind him and glanced the place over. Subdued paint colors, exposed brick, accordion blinds, Ikea couch, Xbox. Black-and-white, contemporary photographs in minimalist frames on the walls; family portraits matted as formally as the art photos; bicycle leaned against the back of the couch; Nat Geo on the little shelf under the coffee table; trophy oar in a bracket over the entertainment center. Tasteful. Bland.

One corner looked a bit more lived-in—an armchair next to an overflowing bookshelf—so he focused on that. Trade journals on the top shelf, neatly labeled business records on the bottom, a combination of classic fiction and old textbooks sticky-noted for reference in the middle—and one framed photograph of a boy and a girl holding a racing shell over their heads. Sam recognized Jacob's sister from her obituary photo.

He moved on to the kitchen. It was separated from the living room by a breakfast bar (tasteful, bland) and equipped with an energy-efficient refrigerator (tasteful, bland) filled mostly with prepackaged health foods (tasteful, bland). A strip of paper on the refrigerator door had a series of numbers scrawled on it; Sam got briefly excited, but then realized they were most likely only jogging times. A battered Brown U mug sat inverted next to the espresso machine.

Why wasn't he close with any of his old classmates?

The breakfast bar had seating for four with more stools stacked in the closet, so evidently Dorner did entertain. Sam leaned against it for a second and frowned. It was vibrating. When he opened the cabinet doors set into the base of the bar, he found a freezer that took up about half of it. It seemed odd; Dorner's fridge was pretty small, but it still wasn't full. All the freezer revealed was a few bags of frozen veggies, though.

Sam passed into the bedroom via the bathroom (clean fixtures, folded towels, _Calvin and Hobbes_ on the back of the toilet). The bedroom was the aesthetic twin of the living room, just with less light and more clutter. Closet full of business casual and fashionable workout clothes; file cabinet of tax returns and the like; weights and sporting gear and guy's-guy tools on a rack in the corner; trendy rug; queen bed. The Kindle on the nightstand was loaded with contemporary fiction and books about naval history. There was lotion in the nightstand, but no porn anywhere. Sam began to suspect that Dorner was the kind of guy who stored most of his life on his laptop. And although there was a laptop tote, the computer itself was missing. Police must have taken it. Expected, but frustrating as hell.

He stood in the middle of the room and expelled his breath. There was another of those black-and-white architectural shots in here—but none of anybody else. All evidence of Jacob's family was out in the living room. Sam took a closer look at the photograph. At first he'd thought these were commercial prints, but he was surprised to realize that not only were they signed, but that the tiny signature penciled in the corner was _J Dorner_. Apparently Jacob fancied himself something of a photographer. They were all architectural subjects: viaducts, arty close-ups of iron girders, abandoned buildings, crumbling graffiti, weird angles of bridge cables. The sort of romanticization of squalor common to people who didn't spend a lot of time living in it.

And the really surprising thing was that this evidence of a hobby was the first surprising thing in here. Practically every other feature of this apartment Sam could have extrapolated from what he already knew of the man on paper. It was all entirely expected, unless you counted the oversized freezer, and, hell, that probably came from the previous tenant.

Nevertheless, he snapped on latex gloves and went deeper.

An hour later, he left in defeat. If Jacob Dorner had ever had a brush with anything more unnatural than over-the-counter tooth-whitener, Sam couldn't find the traces of it. Maybe he really was cracking up.

Or maybe he was just losing his instincts and his edge.

He paused in the apartment building's vestibule to case the street for police, then let himself out. A school bus was letting off children on the corner. Sam let himself get a block away from Dorner's building before he pulled out his phone. If he remembered the map correctly, there was a park just a few blocks away; if he cut through it, he'd come out practically on top of the bus line he needed to get back to the motel, and as a bonus, Jacob had probably jogged there regularly. Maybe he'd luck out into a clue or a witness.

Maybe Dean would buy him a puppy and trade the Impala in for a Volvo.

The afternoon light was slanting and golden. Sam mentally outlined how the rest of the evening would go: he'd meet up with Dean, they'd spend a pointless hour or two sorting through any files he'd liberated from the Providence PD, hit up a drive-through, and leave. It was over.

Dean picked up on the second ring. "Hey."

"Hey." Sam entered the park; it was one of those densely wooded city lots that made the most of the space with winding paths and unchecked undergrowth. "You got anything?"

"Brendan Whitmore was not what you'd call an overachiever. His sister's cute, though. You?"

"Bupkis." It was almost a relief to admit it. "I think I might be able to get somewhere if I had Jacob's laptop or his camera, but I'm pretty sure the police took them. His running shoes were gone, so it's unlikely he had them on him."

That was Dean's opening to offer to do some fraudulent evidence seizure, but unsurprisingly, he didn't take it. "Tough break."

"Yeah." It had been worth a try. "Anyway, I'm headed back. Meet you at the motel?"

There was a pause on the line. Then: "I already checked us out. Since I didn't know if we'd be splitting tonight. I mean. No point throwing dragon gold at an empty room, right?" Another pause, shorter but more awkward. "Rendezvous at the hash house just down the street from it, instead?"

Sam's face burned with humiliation. "Right, yeah, of course." He really should have anticipated that. "See you there in thirty."

He hung up.

He hadn't really been paying attention to the route he was taking for the past sixty seconds. The path had forked, and he'd just let his feet carry him wherever was basically the correct direction on autopilot. Sunlight filtered through spring-green leaves and dappled the asphalt walkway, and the air was just beginning to cool. He was at the bottom of a little hollow. Children's voices came in on the breeze from a playground somewhere, but this place was solitary.

A girl on a trick bike came hurtling around a corner and down the slope, moving so fast and with such total teenaged obliviousness to the possibility that anyone else could be in the way that if Sam hadn't been trained to stay alive (mostly) by dodging fast-moving things with claws, he'd probably have been mown down. As it was, he jumped off the path with a yelp and into squelching mud. She was gone as quickly as she came, momentum carrying her up the opposite side of the hollow and out of sight.

"I don't suppose you've seen a man called Jacob Dorner!" Sam shouted after her.

He lifted his shoe and grimaced. Wading a little farther into the brush to scrape the mud off on a rock, he looked up at the sunlight slanting through the trees.

And saw.

For a second, he wasn't sure. But as he picked his way through the ferns and litter and slightly oily puddles, he found the correct angle and then he knew. He didn't know what it meant, but he knew it had to be the key. All around it, the vegetation was yellowed and curling black at the edges.

When the cold came down and he watched the new leaf in front of him freeze through, he knew why that was, too.

His last thought wasn't about his brother. It was something to do with the hours at the local laundromat.


End file.
